3 Black American Women You Hardly Hear About in American History

Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune knew that education was key, but she also knew it was difficult for young Black children to achieve, particularly in the segregated South. After struggling to go to school and working on a plantation to help support her family, she became an educator and, in 1904, founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Girls. Bethune’s successful stewardship and fundraising for the school eventually gave way to a 1932 merger with the Cookman Institute to form what’s now known as Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college according to PBS.

Bethune’s educational leadership and advocacy efforts also positioned her as a civic leader and political activist, earning a number of presidential appointments. According to the National Council of Negro Women, which Bethune also founded, Bethune was “was the first African-American woman to be involved in the White House” and “served as the informal ‘race leader at large'” under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her Daytona Beach home is now a National Historic Landmark.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Hamer was a civil rights activist from Mississippi who fought for African Americans’ right to vote, often helping them to register. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for a time, fighting against racial segregation and violent voter suppression in the South. She was also one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Hamer brought the issue to the national spotlight during the 1964 Democratic National Convention, pointedly calling out Mississippi’s all-white delegation. Hamer’s eventual, televised testimony of the struggle was so powerful that President Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get it off the air. 

Octavia Butler

Thanks to Donald Trump, Americans have heard the phrase “Make America Great Again” more times than the Pledge of Allegiance. But sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler utilized the slogan, likely drawing on Reagan’s 1980 campaign message, “Let’s Make America Great Again” almost 20 years before Trump in her 1998 book Parable of the Talents, according to Fusion. The dystopian novel depicts a future United States in which slavery has been reintroduced and a fundamentalist Christian sect has taken control, systematically purging the country of non-Christian faiths.

Butler was also an award-winning Black writer — the first science fiction writer to be awarded the MacArthur fellowship, also known as the genius grant, among other awards, The New York Times reported. She passed away in 2006 at age 58.